Speak What We Feel: Not What We Ought to Say: foour Who Wrote in Blook: G.K. Chesterton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare

Philip Yancey

"I look to Frederick Buechner as a mentor in literature and faith, and this book marvelously combines both."

Dallas Willard

"A hauntingly terrifying and beautiful book about the depths of human existence."

Presbyterian Outlook

“[Reverberates] with particular poignancy...speak[s] honestly and eloquently.”

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

“Serves to illuminate a path through the ambiguities and complexities of human life.”

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

"Serves to illuminate a path through the ambiguities and complexities of human life."

Presbyterian Outlook

"[Reverberates] with particular poignancy...speak[s] honestly and eloquently."

Dallas Willard

A hauntingly terrifying and beautiful book about the depths of human existence.

Philip Yancey

I look to Frederick Buechner as a mentor in literature and faith, and this book marvelously combines both.

John Wilson

Hopkins and Twain? Chesterton and Shakespeare? Buechner takes these four writers, never mentioned in the same breath, and shows us a hidden affinity among them, in the process allowing us to see them as we never have before. Speak What We Feel is a book of uncanny insight.

Publishers Weekly

Prolific storyteller, memoirist and poet Buechner (The Son of Laughter; Telling the Truth) offers up a set of four uninspiring meditations on the powerful ways in which literature reveals the depths of human vulnerability as well as humankind's constant search to give meaning to the ambiguities of life. He uses a simplistic and rather vague formula to show that our greatest literature has come from writers who poured their life's blood into their work and unveiled their own shortcomings to us. Buechner then selects particular works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mark Twain, G.K. Chesterton and William Shakespeare as examples of the artist's attempt to articulate forthrightly his own deep struggles with sadness, lonesomeness, guilt or the absence of God. Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, succeeds in staving off the novelist's loneliness and in "piloting a course around both the darkness of the past and the darkness that he knew awaited him not much further downstream." Similarly, the struggle between good and evil central to Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday simply reflects his own struggle with the "black despair" of depression. By mistakenly reading biography as the foundation for the literature, Buechner fails to grapple with the beauties and the difficulties of the works themselves. It is also hard to understand why he narrowed his selections to these four writers when, given his formula, he could just as easily have chosen Dostoyevsky, Emily Dickinson, Dante or Milton. Not one of Buechner's best. (Aug.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Spiritual writer, novelist, and Presbyterian minister Buechner (The Magnificent Defeat) considers four authors and the works that, in his view, each wrote in his own blood about the darkness of life: Gerard Manley Hopkins's late sonnets, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, and Shakespeare's King Lear. He brings a Christian perspective to these works, suggesting, for example, that Shakespeare's Fool becomes a Fool for Christ's sake, sacrificing himself for his friend. Buechner's work is not one of literary criticism. Instead, he uses these works as sources for a meditation on suffering and the literary process, and he shows how the four writers wrestle, either directly or obliquely, with the meaning of Christianity. In an afterword, he reflects on the role of personal sadness in his own writing and suggests that these works might offer a lesson in how each of us could deal with sadness in our lives. This book will appeal to readers interested in either the purgative value of the literary process or the spiritual side of literature. Augustine J. Curley, Newark Abbey, NJ Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.